Solitude in Literary Fiction

The Works of Herman Melville

Herman Melville (1819-1891)
shares with Joseph Conrad the
distinction of being, in the popular mind, a writer of sea stories,
though not as many and essentially dominated by one novel: Moby Dick.
In fact, all of Melville's stories are vehicles for the presentation of
solitude
in many manifestations. In chapter 27 of Moby Dick, Melville
coins the word "isolatoes" to describe
the crew of the Pequod, and thereby the quintessential solitary (his
emphasis):

They were nearly all Islands on the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I
call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each
Isolato
living on a separate continent of his own.

Every solitary is an isolated being, living in his or
her own world
or own continent and not in the world familiar to the average
person. Many characters in Melville's fiction are involuntary
solitaries estranged
by others for their personality, habits, or background. In Typee the narrator
scorns others, while in Mardi
he finds no one "with whom to mingle sympathies." The narrator of Moby Dick opens the
novel by declaring: "Call me Ishmael," thus identifying himself with
the exiled son of the biblical Abraham, exiled into wilderness
and forever
cursed by circumstances. In Pierre,
the femaile character Isabel is the involuntary isolato. In Israel Potter, the
title character wanders like the Hebrews in the desert. Finally, too,
the character of John Marr (in the late collection John Marr and Other Sailors)
finds himself unable to make "sympathetic communion" with others, who
reject him. These hapless victims of involuntary isolation are
scrutable and sympathetic.

Equally within a separate world but interacting afflictively
on others are the voluntary solitaries, especially Ahab in Moby Dick and
Pierre in Pierre.
The latter is presented as an arrogant and selfish
egoist who browbeats the women of his interest. The story tested the
contemporary limits of domestic fiction with its theme of incest, and
thus circumscribes the voluntary solitude of its protagonist to
sociopathy.

But the character of Ahab makes Moby Dick one of
the great novels of American literature.

Critics
have viewed Ahab as a precursor to the Nietszchean overman, a supreme
individualist and implacable egoist. But if that is the case, Ahab is
supremely doomed to defeat and destruction. His tragic fate becomes
what one critic calls "a fearful symbol of the self-inclosed
individualism" that Melville, while a solitary himself, did not
espouse. Indeed, while Melville was initially influenced by Emerson's essays on
solitude, he concluded that Emerson's postulated egoism was not
self-contained reflectiveness but a dangerous narcissism. Thus, for example, Emerson writes:

Nothing is at last sacred but
the integrity of [one's] own
mind. ... What I must do is all that concerns me, not what people think.

and

If I am the Devil's child, I
will live then from the Devil. No
law can be sacred to me but of my nature. Good and bad are but names
very readily transferable to this or that; the only right is what is
after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to
carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if everything were
titular and ephemeral but he.

As Cahir notes:

These characteristics, the
willingness to
persist in a private vision, no matter the cost to others; the ability
to dismiss the needs, feelings, and opinions of all other people; and
the tendency to live a life of acute solitude frame the defining
qualities of Melville's devil child -- the self-reliant isolato.

Cahir quotes a letter of Melville to a friend, criticizing Emerson:

I could readily see in
Emerson, notwithstanding his merit, a gaping flaw. It was in the
insinuation that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he
might have offered some valuable suggestions. These men are all cracked
right across the brow.

Captain Ahab is Melville's paragon of
willfulness and self-destruction, counterpart to the biblical King Ahab
as Ishmael is the counterpart to the biblical exile. The contrast of
ego and virtue is foreshadowed by Father Mapple's sermon, which
Ishmael hears before yet boarding the ill-fated Pequod. Mapple
enjoins blessings upon he "who against the proud gods and
commodores of this
earth ever stands forth his own inexorable self." Mapple thus distinguishes
self resisting pride
and power proffered by the world versus corrupting ego.

Ahab succumbs not
only to an earthly power but rails against heaven as well, insisting on
his plan to slay the white whale:

[I curse] that mortal
interdebtedness which will not do away with
ledgers. I must be free as air; and I'm down in the whole world's
books.

I'd strike the sun if it
insulted me. ... Who is over me? Truth hath no confines.

Truly it demands something
godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity and has
ventured to trust himself for a task-master.

To the last I grapple with
thee ... From hell's
heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee."

In contrast, Ishamel, called by Cahir a "social isolato,"
struggles to resolve involuntary solitude through the sailors' common
tasks and duties, as Conrad would later show, work binding otherwise isolated
souls. For the social isolato is "one who takes part in society, often
affably, and who welcomes fraternal relationships, yet who nevertheless
remains profoundly isolated." A fraternal sense escapes Ahab, while
Ishamel rhapsodizes on the possibility of fellow-feeling, a way of transcending "social
acerbities," though it is admittedly a "strange sort of insanity," ultimately eluding humanity.

Human isolation cannot be overcome by ego but by a
transcendent loving-kindness, Melville suggests. He shows affection and sympathy for his
isolatoes, even for the vile Ahab, who in a moment of clarity says:

When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of
solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a captain's
exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the
greencountry without -- oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast of
solitary command!

Can there by a breakthrough to what Cahir calls the "mystery
of a person's ontology?" Melville sketched isolatoes to experiment with
this possibility, himself having suffered a life of depression, social
isolation, poverty, and eventual neglect. Thus the character of
Bartleby in the novella Bartleby
the Scrivner comes to represent Melville's last insight
(his later fiction penned for income).

If Ahab is Emerson's or Nietzsche's devil child, then Bartleby
is what critics Stempel and Stillians call "Schopenhauer's saint." The
demure Bartleby enters employment as
a copyist in the narrator's law firm, but soon announces that
he "prefers" not to work any more. The narrator treats Bartleby with
exasperating patience and tolerance, unable to penetrate Bartleby's
mind or heart> As the days pass, Bartleby takes to
living day and night in his corner of the office, "prefering"
not to do anything. At wit's end, the narrator moves his office.
The next tenant, not inclined to patience, has the police remove
Bartleby to jail, where Bartleby quits eating and dies. The
enigmatic isolato achieves a Schopenhaurian philosophical
understanding eluding
the narrator, who at story's end sighs: "Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!"

Melville's sympathy for isolatoes paints them in varied
psychologies and depths not fully appreciated in the mid-19th century,
nor fully explored even today. Melville's fiction is the work of a writer
profoundly sharing the fate of his characters, impeccable portraits of
the complexity of solitude.